Love matters

Weekend TV reviewed: Miss Austen Regrets; Page Three Teens; Born Survivor; Love Soup; Pulling

What do women want? That was the fundamental question that vexed both Sigmund Freud and Jane Austen, who wrote over a hundred years apart but agreed on the same answer. For Freud, women wanted a symbolic way to “detach themselves from the mother and find their way to the father”. For Austen, they wanted a big empty house containing a massively repressed husband who was nonetheless smouldering with opaque passion and prone to momentary declarations of love throughout a lifetime of otherwise emotional lockjaw.

For girls, it was all so much easier in Jane Austen's day. You had kedgeree for breakfast, then played all day with your sisters, ran around outside in pretty bonnets if the weather was suitable. And you constantly listened out for the crunch of carriage wheel on gravel that meant one thing: the arrival of boys. These chaps were generally the sons of vicars and frightful bores, nothing like Mr Darcy at all. But still you flirted furiously (a common technique was to run into a maze, giggling and trailing a red ribbon) in the hope that one of these spineless twerps would pluck up the courage to get down on one knee and blurt out a proposal of marriage. If he wasn't too much of a pig to look at, or had a bit of land, then so much the better. But you accepted, regardless. And that was that, your purpose in life achieved. All of which made Miss Austen Regrets (BBC One) something of a revelation.

As the plot of a Jane Austen novel, the plot of Jane Austen's life leaves a lot to be desired. True, it has big country houses, and trips to town, it has dances and visits and gossip and even a slender roster of potential suitors. But it lacks the consummation of Emma or Pride and Prejudice, the sealing fantasy – which Austen herself surely understood as an illusion – that a marriage is the same thing as a happy ending. Still, in the absence of an undiscovered Austen three-decker, the life may have to do, as it did in last year's film Becoming Jane and as it does in Gwyneth Hughes's drama, which offers us the writer not as Olympian observer of mortal agonies but as a vulnerable mortal herself, unprotected against the fevers of romance even by the antibodies of her own sharp fictions.

Miss Austen Regrets, artfully directed by Jeremy Lovering and inspired by correspondence between Jane and her sister Cassandra, quickly turned the traditional approach to Austen worship on its head. The action began with a scene straight from any fictional costume drama. A group of excited girls giggled their way towards a closed door, behind which a man was waiting to propose to one of them. In this case, the man was Harris Bigg (Samuel Roukin) and his fiancée would be Jane Austen herself. But not for long. The following morning she changed her mind and headed off in a coach to the rest of the programme. We rejoined her 12 years later, when she was both a well-established author and, at 39, a well-established old maid. She was not, however, a miserable spinster.

Based mostly between 1814 and 1815, when Austen (Olivia Williams) was writing Emma, the drama depicted the author, flitting between her brother's estate in Kent and her cottage in Hampshire, always witty, often flirtatious– and at one stage reduced to a state of obvious lust by a handsome young doctor, at her creative peak, yet deeply unhappy with her lot. Through startling silver-blue frames and slow-motion set pieces, more pop promo than period adaptation, Austen drily defended her single status (“I never found a husband worth giving up flirting for!”) while advising her niece Fanny Knight (Imogen Poots) on prospective partners. The narrative here was beguilingly loose and without urgency - basically, three parties, two illnesses and a wedding.

Instead, Gwyneth Hughes concentrated on Austen's relationship with Fanny, first turning to her aunt for advice on love and then, by accident, thwarting an incipient romance with Dr Charles Haden by being younger and prettier than her famous relative. Hugh Bonneville turned up as the Reverend Brook Bridges, an old flame of Jane's still smouldering years after she'd first extinguished his hopes, while Jane confessed her youthful flirtation with a man called Tom Lefroy to counter Fanny's accusations that she could have no direct understanding of the pangs of love. Fans of the writer who yearn for her to have had a little more sensibility and a little less sense won't have felt short-changed, with Austen gulping and weeping at various moments, as if lurve mattered far more than art.

Above all, she reflected on her own romantic history, as Fanny’s questions (put, it seemed, on our behalf) constantly raised the issue of why she’d never married. To its credit, the programme didn’t come with a simple answer to that – or a simple emotional response. Instead, Austen pondered her single state with a mixture of bullishness, puzzlement, satisfaction and sadness. In a touching scene towards the end, the Rev Bridges asked her if she was at all sorry that she hadn’t married him. “What would be the point?” said Austen.

The central performance from Williams was inarguably a knock-out, complimented by harsh unglamorous close-ups of a harried face, pale and careworn, and sad, soulful eyes. But best of all, however, were the silences. Whereas the wearisome Austen brand mistakenly equates prolixity with charm, here the words were cut down to a minimum. Gorgeous scenes, composites of close-ups, of Austen alone, staring, reflecting and aching, all underscored by the pining piano of the composer Jennie Muskett, somehow described Austen's crushing loss and confusion without a line of dialogue. The closing topper, where Austen revealed that she was pressurised into remaining unmarried by her sister, and was thus a novelist by default, made complete sense.

And yet, for all its qualities, the script still felt more like a meditation on the woman’s life and work than a fully-realised drama. The chief reason for this was the decision to take so much of what Austen said straight from her letters. Hughes has been through the correspondence with a fine ivory comb, so that when Miss Austen muttered something waspish about an acquaintance's "coarse mother and... sisters like horses", or when she breathily described a young doctor as "something between a man and an angel", the words that were being put into her mouth were at least her own. In theory, using her own prose should have added authenticity. In practice, it not only made some of the dialogue seem slightly stilted and distant. It also gave the presumably false impression that, even in moments of crisis, she spoke almost exclusively in polished aphorisms.

And yet her reticence as a biographical subject still left enough elbow room for dramatic ambiguity. Were her gently mordant remarks about love and infatuation an accurate representation of her wise detachment from affairs of the heart, or did they mask a wounded sense of longing? When she announced that "the only way to get a man like Mr Darcy is to make him up", does the joke hide a wistful desire that it might have been otherwise? In all, there was a feeling that this was a Jane Austen who suited our modern sensibilities just a little too neatly – with her spikiness, her refusal to be seen as a victim, and the fact that blokes threw themselves at her wherever she went. Miss Austen Regrets was always a pleasure to watch, and certainly to look at. In the end, though, it was perhaps more revealing about our idea (or dream) of Jane Austen than about the woman herself.

Nearly 200 years later, and Austen's proto-feminist counterpart is wannabe glamour model Chelsea White, the documentary subject of Page Three Teens (BBC Three, Sunday). Chelsea, like Austen, wanted to support herself through creative endeavours. In the two months before she turned 18 (the legal age for glamour modelling), she thus “thoroughly” investigated the topless business. Which here meant visiting a photo session where a semi-naked babe said “Jordan is an inspiration to girls like me!”, and a wily photographer announced “I think people have realised that you don't have to be thick to be a model!” Yes, but it helps.

Meanwhile, Chelsea - too small for the mainstream, too young for fashion magazines, and too generic for the tabloids - clearly didn't stand a chance. But the show simply stumbled along, haphazardly sticking asides about the dangers of paedophile grooming next to leering close-ups of Chelsea's chest. Typically, it followed the news of Chelsea's all-clear after a breast cancer scare with the announcement: “And there's more good news - she's got a meeting with The Sun's Page 3 photographer!”

David Renwick has also been attempting to farm the thin soil of romantic disillusionment in Love Soup, a series that admirably denies itself a lot of facile satisfactions but that still, nine episodes in, seems not to have found a confident rhythm. Part of the problem is Renwick's ingenuity as a comic writer and his apparently limitless ability to craft new humiliations for his characters. These are often very funny – a man being hurled out of a first-floor window into a bouncy castle, a woman trying to retrieve money from a blind busker's guitar case after being jolted into giving far too much – but they don't always strike you as having anything to do with the characters he's trying to make you believe in. In this week's episode, for example, Alice – a woman we know to have an acute sense of male unreliability – found herself being wooed by a weird German playwright who had necrophiliac tendencies. So far, so funny, particularly because he didn't speak English and they were accompanied on their date by his earnest translator. But then Alice agreed to go back to his hotel room with him, which seemed incredible.

True, the gags were loosely netted together by the idea of death, which was also explored in the filming of an obituary for a character who bore a distant resemblance to Richard Wilson (he combined hugely popular sitcom work with directing rebarbative avant-garde theatre pieces) and through the demise of Alice's relationship with Douglas. But too many of the comic ideas poked through the netting, as if Renwick had decided to jam them in even though they were the wrong shape for this narrative. You had the sense that he'd looked through his writer's notebook and collaged together every orphan idea he'd had for the past 10 years. Quite a few of them deserved a home somewhere, but all too often here you felt that the characters were propping up the gags, instead of the gags propping up the characters.

Now, with all the justified fuss about Gavin & Stacey, BBC3’s other Sunday-night sitcom, Pulling, seems to have been sadly overlooked. The show is definitely less viewer-friendly than Gavin & Stacey – i.e. it’s horrible rather than nice. Nonetheless, in its own black way, it’s equally good. In fact, you could argue that, unlike Gavin & Stacey’s, its second series has been better than its first: managing to remain consistently funny, while sparing us nothing at all in its excruciating depiction of people who find themselves completely adrift as they leave their youth behind.

For a time, last night’s final episode looked alarmingly as if it might end on a note of redemption. Karen (Tanya Franks) got pregnant and her boyfriend Billy (Paul Kaye) sobered up to embrace the responsibilities of fatherhood. Fortunately, we needn’t have worried. Billy soon hit the booze again – and Karen’s supposed pregnancy turned out to be venereal disease. (“So, I’m not going to have a baby,” she asked the doctor by way of summary, “but I have got the clap?”) It also says quite a lot about Pulling’s bleakness that for Karen this wasn’t necessarily an unhappy ending.

Of course, what women really want comes in the form of lean, mean dung-squeezing, urine-drinking Old Etonian action man Bear Grylls, star of Born Survivor (Channel 4). Poor Bear, however, possibly suffering a credibility breakdown after the “faking it” scandal that rocked his reputation, has split into two personalities. There's the one on camera, doing all the naturey stuff - in this case negotiating the jungles of Panama, climbing down vines and, er, walking quickly. And there's the Bear on the soundtrack, Voiceover Bear, who seems to have overdosed on danger pills. “One move and it could be game over!” growls Voiceover Bear as Screen Bear climbs into a pothole. And, best of all, while Screen Bear stares blankly at a spiky plant, Voiceover Bear hisses: “One touch, and you're dead!” Or not.